Ideas:

Software: The silent guy, MPD, Play Airwolf at due time --> combined using Jack (some people suggest pulseaudio can also be used for this purpose)

FM? Transmitter of receiver?

Make all use cases configurable via the network, proposed solutions:

Hack the main amplifier

Hack the main amplifiers remote

Do a full software solution

connect extra audio line to the PC's line-in

use a analog capture card to get FM input, and make these streams configurable by MPD (The Medion used as table-PC seems to have a capture card)

use djmount to automatically mount uPNP shares enabling easy access to media files on other devices

Hardware:

What we have available

A two channel amplifier. (Bert)

Two big speakers (Bert)

An average sized stereo (Kurt)

A small stereo (Impy)

A desktop with surround sound-card (Tom)

Jack to cinch cables

Cinch to cinch cables

Thanks to all who have contributed hardware!

What we need

The small stereo currently used as aft amplifier could use an update.

Todo

Hang all speakers

Connect all speakers to there amplifiers (Only one left todo, rear left)

Rack mount the amplifier

Connect the amplifiers to the PC

Give the Audio System a fixed IP

Optional

Figure out what the s-control port does on the main amplifier.

Make the amplifier for the aft speakers powered only when music is played in that room.

Software:

This configuration was made original on (K)Ubuntu 10.10, now (K)Ubuntu 11.04.

Jack

We will try to use Jack to make smooth combination of the audio sources. Jack was installed from the repositories. It's currently working however audio quality is horrible and now unusable. Some further investigation led me to the conclusion that Pulse-audio can also be used for this purpose. Since Pulse-audio is the default sound back-end for Ubuntu these days that option has proven to be easier to implement.

Pulseaudio

Ubuntu 11.04

PulseAudio does not recommend running it system wide (link). So from now on we run everything audio related as the whitespace user. This will user will autologin and start mpd,xbmc,...

Enable auto-login under Gnome/GDM:

System -> Administration -> Login Screen

"Log in as" 'whitespace'

No further changes are needed.

Ubuntu 10.10

In Ubuntu 10.10 Pulse-audio is normally started on a per user basis when you log in to you gnome session. As we would like to run MPD even if nobody is logged in we also need to run Pulse-audio system-wide. This can easily be done by putting the following line in /etc/default/pulseaudio:

PULSEAUDIO_SYSTEM_START=1

Now we can start Pulse-audio system-wide:

sudo killall pulseaudio
sudo /etc/init.d/pulseaudio start

After this only users in the pulse-access group can use the audio device. So we need to add both our regular user and the user running MPD (default mpd) to this group. This can be done using the following command:

sudo usermod -a -G pulse-access whitespace

MPD Server

Ubuntu 11.04

As PulseAudio runs per user, we will let mpd (and everything else audio related) run under whitespace account.
References:

Ubuntu 10.10

MPD or Music player Deamon. Installed from repositories. By default MPD is configured to run system wide and use Alsa as a sound back-end. Because we want to blend several audio streams together we cannot use Alsa but Pulse-audio. To make MPD use Pulse-audio the Alsa section in /etc/mpd.conf needs to be commented out and the Pulse-Audio section needs to be uncommented.

MPD sound Menu

To allow the locally logged in user on the audio server easy control over the MPD daemon we installed mpd-sound-menu. This a small applet for the Gnome sound menu in the top menu bar. Installation instructions:

djmount

We will use djmount to make all UPNP shares on the local network available to MPD. Like most software djmount can be installed straight from the repositories. The next commands allow you to mount and umount all UPNP servers on your network.

Android

Web client

Ampache (No longer active)

A web interface to stream one's media library and control an MPD server.
The debian install package seems to have a bug so it is necessary to create an extra symlink before configuration can begin. This web interface is available at http://audio/ampache. Try it using user root and password ****** (the one we often use)

Ampache requires a MySQL database. It was installed from repositories with as root password the one we use too often. The ampache user in the MySQL db is ampache, the password is """"

MPDplayer

A very simple and straight forward PHP application. Make sure Apache, PHP and the Apache PHP module are all installed properly. Download the tar file from this site http://www.renedegroot.nl/mpd.xml. Then all you have to do is untar it to your www directory and make sure user rights are set up properly. When you're in the space you can access it by simple visiting http://audio.

Silent Guy

Playing Airwolf

The Airwolf theme should be played on midnight Thursday and Friday. The file will come straight from YouTube, so we are not storing copyrighted information on our server. Play Airwolf from command line straight from YouTube ignoring video:

Youtube VLC issue

After Youtube did an update to their service the implementation explained above stopped working. A solution was found here: http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=89164. There are two possibilities explained. The approach using the compiled version of the .lua file failed on my configuration.